A notable dilemma in the educational systems of current year is the lack of diversity in the faculty, administration, and curriculums. Diversity in education is colloquially understood to instill benefits in students that include development of sophisticated communication skills and heightened motivation, which may in turn have measurable benefits on health. In an effort to articulate the impact of introducing greater variegation into these systems and vocalize recommendations toward incorporating diversity into existing educational systems, the history of minority groups in schooling systems was analyzed, as were common health concerns for these communities. To this end, local students from Arizona State University were surveyed about their perceptions on diverse populations within their educational system. Moreover, these groups were also polled about how the messaging they receive about health and diversity may impact self-perceptions about their own health, as well as how applicable that messaging is with their own experiences.

Psychological therapy is the process of understanding, treating, and maintaining a healthy psyche. Psychological therapy comes in many shapes and sizes. Different methods of therapy include but are not limited to cognitive behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy, psychoanalytic therapy, group therapy, and humanistic therapy. Most of these major therapeutic options fall under the umbrella of “talk therapy”. Although talk therapy is effective, practicing talk therapy exclusively limits not only the capabilities of therapy, but also potential clientele who would benefit from alternatives to talk therapy. Because each psyche is as unique and individual as fingerprints, each person seeking therapy should be able to create a personalized therapy program. Generating unique combinations of various therapy methods that are catered specifically to the client is a way to achieve this lofty goal. This research intends to better understand whether this proposal of combining various therapeutic techniques and methods in order to achieve individualized therapy programs will increase the effectiveness of the therapy being administered. In this meta analysis, the focus will be on animal therapy and poetry therapy used in conjunction theoretically as an example of potential applications for various combinations in conjunctive therapy. Conjunctive therapy is the main idea being piloted in this thesis and is a new form of therapy that involved the usage of two therapeutic techniques together while maintaining and equal prevalence and importance between them.

​​Social curiosity, a desire to learn about others, may play an important role in socio-cognitive development in early childhood. However, we poorly understand whether and how social curiosity is elicited. In this study, we examined the malleability of social curiosity in young children by developing a “Social Uncertainty Paradigm.” Children aged 5 to 8 (30 collected, target N = 105) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (Social Curiosity (SC), General Curiosity (GC), or No Curiosity (NC)) and introduced two learning objectives: the new person (Sam) and new object (Apple House). Participants had 10 chances to gather information about either Sam and the Apple House. In SC, participants obtained 4 times more facts about Sam than the Apple House. The reverse was true for GC. To maximize uncertainty (a lack of information), the experimenter remarked about the difference in the amount of information they gathered. In NC, participants obtained the same amount of facts about Sam the Apple House. Next, participants’ social curiosity were measured with two tasks: Choice Task measuring their preference for learning between Sam and the Apple House and Rating Task measuring the degree to which they want to learn more about both Sam and the Apple House (5-point Likert scale). Preliminary results suggest that creating uncertainty in social information elicits social curiosity and is associated with more active information seeking behaviors to fill the knowledge gap. The current study will provide practical information that could be used for creating social curiosity-promoting environments.